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Lego Christmas Production Shortage
shadowspar writes, "Recent restructuring and production cuts have left Lego unable to fill orders for the upcoming holiday season. Affected products include Duplo bricks, Lego City sets, and (horror of horrors!) Star Wars and Lego Technik sets." According to the article Lego stands to lose $127 million in holiday sales.
This is just terrible. You simply can't imagine the disappointment this will cause me- uh, I mean, will cause little Junior this Christmas. He really wants a Lego Millenium Falcon. It's just so cute when he says "ma-ma" but he just can't quite get "-llenium Falcon" part of the ship's name out. Of course, he'd just eat the mini-figures, so the set will have to stay in my room.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Yup, it's gonna' be tough. The plant in Enfield, CT. (which I worked at for awhile) deals with packaging the Legos (created overseas) into their boxed forms to be shipped to distributors. However, the place was pretty badly run. While I was working there, there was a little bit of leeway being made in improving the efficiency of the packaging, because of hours you could be standing on a line waiting for the legos you need to package to complete your order. And it wasn't because of the laziness of the workers, the workers themselves would get angry at the fact that they weren't doing anything, eventually sending workers to other operational lines in a hope to scrap some amount of energy out of the workforce otherwise left doing nothing at their current post.
The problem was with the management of the distribution of the packages. The legos come in with all of one style of lego (say, a 2x4 red brick) in large bins. They will be poured into individual bins that go into the line and separated into those little pouches either completely or mostly by machine. There had been under way plenty of industrial engineering trying to make the factory "flow" better. As it was, the pieces would come in and be thrown into one corner of the factory. When they were needed, they would have to be found, and then brought to the line. Leftovers get put back in bins and thrown in another corner.
And there was the problem. Each line was built in the hopes to be able to package any style of box, but because no line really specialized in one style of packaging (save for one or two exceptions, like the Bionic lines specializing in the tubed packages), combined with the fact that the movement of materials to different lines seemed at best ad-hoc (mismanaged), led to a decrease in performance.
Now, the people working the lines were doing their job, and it's too bad that they were eventually laid off. Although the lines were created to allow an increase for modularity in the packaging, the system to bring the pieces to those lines are what failed. By the time the company got to trying to solve the problem, it was too late. The entire way the factory was run, going from a single, central repository of pieces to more of a separated, distributed repository layout (where the pieces are closer to the lines where they would actually be used) would just be too much, in their eyes.
I guess they decided that so long as they were going to have to rebuild the entire factory's layout, they might as well do it where the wages are lower as well.
I'm not a industrial engineer in any right, but that's just what I was able to witness. I probably wouldn't have even written this post if it wasn't for the manager of the shift who would constantly lie blatantly to the employees ("You will not be laid off"). Everyone knows that he was lying, and the good will of the workers was being broken by that mentality.
Not sure if I spouted one piece of good info in this post, but hey, what's Slashdot if not to post uninformed ramblings.